Portrait of Innocence(Aesthetics of Collocation in Photography)

The literal meaning of “collocation” is the close association of things, or the arrangement of things beside each other. The etymology of “collocation” comes from the Latin word “collocatus,” past participle of “collocare,” which means to place or to set side by side in a place or position. “Locus” is the root word of “collocare,” meaning “place” or “position.”

In the corpus of linguistics, “collocation” is defined as the co-occurrence of two or more words that are frequently or typically used together. For example, “herd of cows,” “crystal clear,” “blue sky,” “red sun,” “part and parcel,” etc.

In art, aesthetics of collocation or “media-collocation,” as coined and defined by this writer, is the juxtaposition of two or more mediums, arranged sided by side in a single or series of textual or visual composition.

As an aesthetic device, media-collocation elicits discursive interpretation of the binary subjects from referential to the final juxtaposition of the artworks. Media-collocation heightens the portrayal of textual and visual images into a deeper understanding of aesthetic symbol and meaning.

There are two kinds of media-collocation: inductive and deductive. Inductive collocation is to produce the same textual or visual image from the same subject and arrange them either in a linear or layered locus. The deductive collocation, on the other hand, is to extract a symbolic image from textual or visual sources and place the artwork (texts or images) side by side with the referential subject as integral part of the entire aesthetic composition.